Field Days
Last together behind his wood shed,
making out against the worn shingles
until his girlfriend tracked us down, gripping
a pitchfork as if to run us out of some
old-timey town. We’d had it coming,
ever since the county fair — we met
at the dairy show, then rubbed up against
each other in the oxen barn near those two-
thousand-pound beasts who crapped everywhere.
When his girlfriend took him back
I came straight apart. He said something
about the ability to love many people
but being morally bound to only one.
He said it so earnestly.
I told him to just die already.
He hadn’t always been beautiful. Looking
through old photos I’d swiped from his top
dresser drawer, the ones before he’d figured out
how to dress, what to do with his hair —
I’d think, I’m not attracted to this man.
I would have kissed him back then
only out of sympathy.
His lack of beauty is what I cling to now.
Not us sneaking around, or the way
he’d take a block of ice in his hands and chip
off enough for our whiskeys, then kiss me
for an hour. The last time I saw him
he pulled a bobby pin out of my hair.
He wanted to run his hands straight through
my long bangs, and placed the pin
in my open palm. It was the last tender
thing he did for me. Ten minutes later
he was gone.
* * * * *
The Old Mill
Down 100 along the White River,
between Warren and Hancock,
through a heavy door
propped open, I’d crept inside.
I’d gone there to meet Henry Parrish,
bicycled that afternoon past
Roxbury Gap and Moss Glen Falls,
until I’d reached the old woolen mill,
whose clapboards were the color
of newsprint. The mill stood
upright despite it all, three
stories high with a cupola on top,
the heavy timber framing still
grand as I entered the main room.
The machinery sold off years ago.
But signs of life all around —
beer cans crushed, resting on their sides,
take-out containers, cigarette stubs,
evidence of a small campfire,
a circle of ash. Off the main room
sat a lone cot, the mattress swelled,
discolored, the frame sagging,
broken-legged. I’d wondered
about this place for years,
and now to be here, waiting
for Henry, dotting cherry gloss
on my lips, as the 12-over-12
windows set a hazy glow all over.
Then I heard him, finally.
Henry slipped in as I did,
had ridden his bike along the river,
past the glass blowers,
past the old Granville Inn,
closed long before we were born.
He found a push broom
and swept an area as wide
as the two of us, laid down
the wool blanket he’d brought,
and I was woozy, the late-day
light all around us, pouring
through the windows,
the dust swirl everywhere.
He pulled me close and we kissed,
his tongue a thrill in my mouth.
I clutched him, held his sides,
trembling. He took my ear in his
mouth and asked if we could 69,
but I didn’t know what that meant,
so I said can we just make love?
Hoping that calling it that
would make it so — and he rolled
on a condom and laid me flat
and rose up on his knees.
I believed for a moment
he would make the sign
of the cross, and I thought
of my mother — how, in an instant,
I would become someone she
no longer knew. I wondered
if something cleaved in her
as it did in me —
if, at that moment in her garden,
or feeding the chickens,
she felt it, too? We moved
together, Henry and I —
I tried to keep up with him,
his knees sliding, the blanket
folding in waves against me,
the air a haze of silt, thick
with ruin — working to make
something beautiful in the old mill.
We left in a trance at twilight,
both on our bikes, a flashlight
pressed between my right palm
and the handlebar. I kept moving
until my tires found pavement,
the yellow dividing lines guiding
me home, as I pedaled away
from the old mill, the first
cathedral of my undoing.
— after James Dickey